


a eulogy delivered in whispers

by beholder



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Resurrection, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), look within ur local creek and u may find an ancient god and also a friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-15 23:27:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28821474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beholder/pseuds/beholder
Summary: It's been four hours since the collapse of the house on Neibolt street and Richie is left to grapple with his grief in the shadows of the kissing bridge.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 5
Kudos: 37





	a eulogy delivered in whispers

**Author's Note:**

> this has been gathering dust on my computer for months now and it's probably time to let it see the light, apologies for any run-on sentences/grammar fumbles.

The ground surrounding the concrete foundation of the kissing bridge is damp and viscous, rich in nutrients from decaying leaves and carpeted in moss.

It’s resolutely empty and nearly silent, the water passing slowly between stones in the shallow stream is the only distinctive sound.

This is where Richie Tozier will bury what he has left. Hands heavy with the weight of grief.

He stops first on the bridge itself. His engine idling, his face in his hands in the driver's seat.

There's blood beneath his fingernails and what feels like gravedirt in the furrows of his palms. His cracked glasses tucked inside the pocket of a shirt bearing the telltale wrinkles of something stuffed hurriedly into a duffel bag a lifetime ago.

He never unpacked.  
  
He never thought he’d be here long enough to warrant it.

It's been four hours since the house on Neibolt street retreated into the dark with Eddie Kaspbrak held tight in its embrace.

His hands tense around his temples, cradling his skull. The heels of his palms pressed into the hollows of his eyesockets. As if the pressure there is enough to ground him while he replays the scene over and over again.

To put it simply: It’s not.

To put it less simply: He’s not sure anything ever will be.

Richie climbs from the car with the key left in the ignition, any extras on the ring hanging down into the shadowed abyss below the wheel.

He thinks he’s pulled off the road far enough that no other drivers would clip the door he leaves flung open, but who fucking cares if they do anyway. Who cares about any of it.

_Eddie had cared about cars._

He’s holding a pocket knife, it is the end of August and this scene is not so dissimilar from the last time he was here.

Dappled in the patchwork shade of summer, filled with the pressing need to articulate a feeling bigger than there seemed to be words for.

He re-carves two letters in the pitted wood, an R and an E, with a shakily outlined plus sign to link them.

He’s crying again, which is dimly surprising in that he'd thought at this point there might not be anything left in him to cry out. That the rawness of his throat would simply worsen with the weight of the sorrow trapped there like a half swallowed pill. Soundless.

He’d thought that maybe after today he’d never cry again. That this would be it for him, wrung out and empty with a grief so weighted that no other tragedy could phase him.

He can’t tell if he’d welcome that or if it scares him, in some hollow looming way.

The letters are stark now, edges clean and clear in the wood and when he stands back to full height exhaustion causes the motion to spark his vision.

He closes his eyes then, places his hands on the rough wood of the only place he’d declared that he hoped love was real and breathes. Shoulders curled forward, less of a protective stance now and more of a last ditch attempt to find comfort in making himself smaller.

It doesn’t work.

There’s a brief moment where he thinks back to the car, considers returning to the townhouse and the abundance of alcohol behind the dust covered bar there, but he can’t separate the space from the thought of the twin suitcases in Eddie’s empty room. Not yet.

The engine is still running behind him and he can’t remember if there’s enough gas left in the tank to last but who cares. He’ll walk if he has to.

He ends up beneath the bridge, shoes damp with the pull of the mud, quarry water drying into his clothes.

Eddie is gone. 

Richie’s hand presses against his breast pocket, and it isn’t over his heart but it's close enough that he thinks he can still feel the ache. He draws his glasses out, unfolds the arms and runs his thumb over the shattered left lens where Eddie’s blood has dried in the cracks.

Maybe that’s what breaks him in the end, he thinks dully. The knowledge that enough time has passed that the blood isn’t wet anymore. That the world is still continuing to turn and that he's expected to continue with it.

A sob tears through him as he pries the lens from the acetate rim to be buried in the sunlit grove of his youth.

This is a place they’d played as kids, this is where Richie threatened to eat poison ivy on a dare once just to rile Eddie up. 

This is where Eddie had asked him if he was going to homecoming and where had Richie said he wouldn’t be caught dead at a school dance in response.  
  
Instead he had stayed home and drank pilfered beer until he threw up. He had fallen asleep that night with his head aching, thinking about the way Eddie had furrowed his brow while trying to tie a perfect windsor knot and how much Richie had wanted to kiss those lines smooth.

He presses the lens into the earth and pulls more over to cover it with the cup of his palm.

The stream rushes louder now that he’s closer and when he crouches to clean his hands of blood and dirt, he sees a turtle sunning on a log.

It looks at him, light dancing along the lines of its shell as it blinks slowly, before slipping seamlessly into the water to be borne away on the current. Unhurried.

He thinks _Let it take me too,_ mouths the shape of the words against his palm and is unsure at this moment if he’s talking about It or the stream.

He doesn’t hear the steps behind him until they’re too close to avoid.

A hand touches his shoulder, a familiar voice speaks, and when he turns to face the source of the sound he's sure he'll only see the empty woods unravelling around him like a late summer kaleidoscope.  
  
This is not the case.

Eddie Kaspbrak stands half-smiling in the sunlight, waterlogged but whole and when Richie pulls him into his arms it's the most alive he thinks he’s ever felt.

Eddie murmurs his name while running his own shaking hands up the length of Richie’s back. Presses his palms into the tender space beneath Richie's shoulder blades and breathes him in.

Says he can’t explain how he woke up along the stretch of the stream here, with his clothes torn and bloody while the body beneath them was somehow knit back together, but Richie thinks he hears the word _turtle_ and chokes a wordless sound of gratitude into the collar of Eddie's shirt, the line of his throat.

Eddie runs gentle thumbs under his eyes and when he kisses Richie, Richie kisses him back.

His gas tank is empty once they struggle back onto the bridge.

Richie with shaking hands leads them to stand in front of a carving of two letters, first etched in a summer a lifetime ago and in response Eddie shows him a simple blocky R carved inside of a heart not much further down. Tells him a story about another boy wanting so desperately to believe in love and runs his thumb over the crooked line of Richie’s knuckles the entire time.

They walk back to the townhouse. 

The sun sets and limns everything in gold as it does.

**Author's Note:**

> Also I didn't have the chance to mention it here but Stan lives too bc I refuse to let him stay dead.
> 
> That being said, thank you for reading this ! I haven't written for fandom in a really long time but I'm stoked to be here in clowntown.


End file.
